<p>Not in DC or among Americans. But I have a diverse group of friends, and I find this attitude especially prevalent among Africans (where “brilliant” people do Economics or Finance) or amongst people from the Indian sub-continent (where a “proper” job is in the research/medicinal, engineering, or Computer/IT fields, etc)</p>
<p>Africans tend to be the biggest culprit, especially economists and those in finance. It’s at the point where they literally scoff and advise me against “foofoo” stuff like IR. Just today I had lunch with a young colleague who is an economist (I’m in IR) and he casually said "anyone can be a diplomat). In some circles there seems to be some perception that International Affairs field is lightweight. </p>
<p>Classic bias against social science/humanities fields - the “quantitative or bust” mentality. Apparently, if you can’t put it into an Excel formula, it’s not science.</p>
<p>Qualitative research, of course, remedies the problem that in the real world, not everything can be reduced to an Excel formula.</p>
<p>Don’t worry about what other people think about what you’re doing.</p>
<p>It’s a lot easier to get a basic degree in polisci/IR than in many quantitative disciplines, because the work is “fuzzier”, and you don’t have to think as often. The number of engineers who aren’t scared of writing quite often greatly exceeds the number of English majors who are afraid of the basic math utilized. That’s because you get better at writing with maturity quite rapidly, even if you do not put in a ton of effort. Whereas quantitative skills tend to require hard and fast practice.</p>
<p>That said, to do a good job at any field, you should have to think hard anyway. </p>
<p>I wouldn’t recommend not carefully considering why people are against what you are doing, but rather you should find out why, think about if it makes sense for you to care for those reasons, and if not, forget about it. Educated disdain is greater than ignorant disdain for what the common opinion is.</p>
<p>As Exhibit A for my argument, I present to you mathboy98’s ridiculously condescending post.</p>
<p>If learning advanced English vocabulary, reading comprehension and analysis is so easy, why is it that the verbal GRE score curve goes vertical, to the point where 740 is 99th percentile?</p>
<p>I’ve read through stacks of freshman-level papers as a teaching assistant. Even passable academic writing is by no means a universal skill.</p>
<p>Other cultures are much more brutally honest about the ability required for one field vs. another. In America, everyone is a special little angel and gets butt-hurt when told otherwise.</p>
<p>
Because it’s designed and normalized to be that way. We could make it 99th percentile at 300 if desired or 10th percentile at 800. The same can be done with math.</p>
<p>I agree with polarscribe - don’t let things like that get to you too much.</p>
<p>There are far too many people in the world with an elitist mindset. You know, the kinds of people not only always have to be better than someone, but also feel the need to bring down others. Maybe they’re insecure, or just not nice people in general. But hey, what can you do?</p>
<p>Personally, I don’t think you can such distant fields all too much. They do too many different things and require different training/schooling to get to where they are.</p>
<p>It’s not “getting to me”. It’s just an attitude that I run into A LOT. Like that guy who casually said, “anyone can be a diplomat”. </p>
<p>For many (mostly but not exclusively African males), being “brilliant” is only in finance or economics. Specifically International Relations or its variations are ridiculed as worthless or “foo foo”. </p>
<p>For many (but not exclusively) Indians, being smart or brilliant means you’re a good computer programmer or a doctor or engineer or medical researcher…</p>
<p>Excuse the generalizing, but I’m talking specifically of the crowds I run into. </p>
<p>On a more general level, not just restricting to IR, based on forums Liberal Arts majors have a very, very bad reputation.</p>
<p>These forums are a horribly skewed and totally unrepresentative sample of the college-going population.</p>
<p>Ask a top State Department or USAID official if studying international relations is “easy” - I bet you would get a different answer.</p>
<p>All those “brilliant” economists are looking pretty stupid right now anyway, seeing as our economy’s in the tank largely because their allegedly-genius policies turned out to be total disasters.</p>
<p>“Everyone borrow buckets of money and buy stuff! Home prices will never go down! Ever! Take out giant loans at absurd interest rates! Spend more, more, more! Loan coming due? Just refinance it away! Stop thinking and start spending!”</p>
<p>If that’s what people conside “brilliant,” then please just call me dumb.</p>
<p>Yes, the brighter students from the developing world are more inclined toward subjects like engineering or the hard sciences. A lot of it has to do with that being a necessity to get ahead in their countries whereas that isn’t the case in Western countries. Even so, I wouldn’t necessarily argue that IR is a hard thing to understand–certainly the number of engineers who can intelligently discuss global politics far outnumbers the number of political science majors who can talk about the intricacies of designing a bridge. The real value of political science/IR as a subject IMHO is perspective. I think it’s necessary to have a proper combination of historical/current affairs knowledge as well as a theoretical background to really develop expertise in policy analysis and understanding why decisions are made and what impact they will have. Or just address it from a purely practical perspective: I don’t think the CIA is hiring too many microbiologists to study political trends in Yemen right now.</p>
Wow. What a sense of entitlement. Study a run-of-the-mill subject and then complain about not being perceived as brilliant. Blame elitism and other cultures. Yeah, okay. </p>
<p>Blaming foreign mindsets is especially amusing since every single one of those professions is more respected in the U.S. as well.</p>
<p>
That’s not the problem. Sure if we picked random people and put them into the job, they’ll fail miserably. They need training first. Same with engineering. But society seems to think that a lot more people would fail out of an engineering curriculum than a PS/IR one. Hence the difference in attributed difficulty.</p>
<p>
This is it. In the back of your minds, most of you know this to be true. There’s no conspiracy against PS/IR/liberal arts. If you like what you do/study, stop being insecure about whether anyone else thinks you’re smart or not. You don’t see me whining about electrical engineering not being thought of as being on the same level as theoretical physics.</p>
<p>But I’ll let you all get back to comforting each other.</p>
<p>The self-declared superiority around here is amusing and pitiable.</p>
<p>I work with a gaggle of “hard scientists.” My father has a Ph.D in paleontology from Berkeley. Not one of them has ever expressed such an attitude.</p>
<p>My boss has an M.S. in forest ecology. He hired me for my talents in communications. Oddly enough, that makes me a valuable part of his team.</p>
<p>In the real world, people don’t sit around arguing over whose field of study makes them more awesome - they work together and use their respective skills to produce results.</p>
<p>I’m also puzzled by the need to establish academic superiority. As I said, IR isn’t going to be a difficult subject for most people. I studied IR because I liked the subject and wanted to pursue a career in it. Certainly the career potential is a factor when determining a course of study, but I don’t think I would’ve been happy as an engineer or accountant. </p>
<p>As for Gshine’s point, a subject can have worth without being top dog in an intellectual ****ing contest. I too have read many “quant-genius-or-bust” arguments, to which I wonder how that argument would fare when the world became saturated with computer programmers or mathematicians (and I’m sure some of the jobless in those fields would argue that may already be the case). Not to mention that political science has become less about real-world application and more about mathematical models with little relevance to anything, which is one of the reasons why I’ve come to loathe the field in academia.</p>
<p>That was a joke by the way lol. I also wished I had the chances to study IR because I love learning about cultures and countries and people not stuff I cannot see lol</p>
<p>In the eyes of many, prestige is almost always tied to earning potential and/or social status within a particular society or culture. This is why any American family would likely be thrilled to have a child acing med school with the goal of becoming a cardiologist (and all their friends/neighbors would ooh and aah over it); in Eastern Europe, on the other hand, cardiologists aren’t exactly raking in $400k p.a., so the typical response would be “oh, how cute, you’re such a little do-gooder, devoting yourself to the downtrodden, maybe someday you can marry up and your husband can buy you a car or something <em>pat pat</em>”. It’s largely a function of the cultural lens you view these things through.</p>
<p>That said, I completely disagree with the earlier statement that you “don’t have to think as much” in IR/poli sci. If you’re good at what you do and not simply shuffling paper, you have to think ALL the time, because there’s NEVER a single right answer to anything you’re doing. My dad’s a math professor, I’m in the IR field - I certainly can’t do what he does, but he can’t do what I do, either, so it’s comparing apples and oranges.</p>